Material Progress

September 6 - December 1, 2024

Material Progress featuers the work of artists Dina Nazmi Khorchid, Marla L. McLeod, and Diana Weymar (Tiny Pricks Project). Through fiber, text, sculpture and paintings, Material Progress invites us to explore themes of the condition of our democracy, the (in)stability of our metaphorical home: the United States, issues that polarize and themes that unite. Opportunities for artmaking, exchange and engagement with the artists intend to reinforce the importance of participation in society’s search for a path forward.

Material Progress features selections from Diana Weymar’s noteworthy 5,000+ piece public art Tiny Pricks Project, as well as Weymar’s own collectible work. Both present text-based vintage fabrics grappling with universal themes and ongoing history-making events and issues, while reflecting and memorializing the ephemeral, digital society in which we live. Visual artist Dina Nazmi Khorchid’s textile installation invites visitors to consider domesticity, land and memory. Mixed media artist Marla L. McLeod’s sculptural work, installations and paintings highlight challenging historical truths and re-envision complex cultural dilemmas.

Material Progress is opening concurrently with the publication of Diana Weymar’s Crafting a Better World: Inspiration and DIY Projects for Craftivists (HarperCollins). This curated collection of “essays, exclusive profiles of well-known creatives, and projects'' reflects the artist’s deep interest in connection and resistance through creativity.

Press Mentions

McQuaid, Cate. "From ‘Tiny Pricks’ to public monuments: 9 art shows with big questions about our country as Election Day nears”. Boston Globe (Boston, MA). September 5th, 2024. Link

Selected Exhibited Artworks and Install Shots

Marla L. McLeod. American Dream (2019). Black yarn, brown twine, acrylic paint, wood.

Diana Weymar and the Tiny Pricks Project; installation detail

Dina Nazmi Khorchid. Land, Untitled, 2 (2024). Photograph, charcoal and pigment on fabric and paper, shot over and over again - woven on a jacquard loom

Dina Nazmi Khorchid, Resting Pigeons on Collapsed Tiles (2023). Charcoal, graphite and gouache, woven with mohair, boucle, rayon, bambu and polyester on a jacquard loom

Marla L. McLeod. Self Portrait (2022). Collaged and annotated Declaration of Independence, broken switch, beads, on sports store mannequin torso; acrylic paint, wood stain, nails on wood scraps; Background: acrylic paint, beads, leather on canvas

Dina Nazmi Khorchid. I Put a Screen Between Us to Face Loss Less Profoundly, 4 (2024). Hand-pulled silkscreen pigment monoprint on linen

Diana Weymar. If Right Doesn't Matter... (2024). Embroidery on handwoven textile

Dina Nazmi Khorchid, Pigeons, On Repeat - The Stare (2021). Reactive dye digital monoprint on linen

Untitled (2024), Photograph, reactive dye digital monoprint on linen

Marla L. McLeod, Aquila Yannic [I Have a Whole World] (2020), Oil on canvas

Installation and art photography by Drake Curtis.

About the Artists

Dina Nazmi Khorchid (b. 1987, Kuwait) is a visual artist who works primarily with printed and woven textiles. Her work constructs narratives of place and connections to lost bodies, through mark-making, photography and material studies, that manifest as textiles and works on paper. She explores themes of identity and geo-politics, grief, land and memory access; in relation to being a third-generation Palestinian refugee, an artist and daughter of a disappeared casualty of the Gulf War.

Dina’s work is in private collections and was featured in group shows in the UAE, USA, Lebanon and Tunisia, including exhibitions at Art Dubai, B7L9 Art Centre, Institute for Palestine Studies, Field Projects, Tashkeel and 421. She completed a Master of Fine Arts in Textiles at the Rhode Island School of Design (2023), where she was a recipient of the Society of Presidential Fellows Award and a Bachelors in Visual Communication from the American University of Sharjah (2009). Dina was awarded Artist-in-Residence at Texere (Mexico, Feb 2024), Vermont Studio Center (USA, Sept 2023), Fellow at Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program (Lebanon, 2018-2019) and is an alumnus of the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Emerging Artists Fellowship (UAE, 2016-2017).

Marla L. McLeod explores identity and social constructs within Black communities through her portrait paintings, textiles, and sculptures. In 2022 she held a solo exhibition at Essex Arts Center in Lowell, MA and is an artist in the New England Triennial at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Fruitlands Museum.

In 2021 she received a Walter Feldman Fellowship, awarded by the Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston and was a spotlighted artist interviewed by Cristela Guerra at WBUR/NPR Boston. 2021 has seen her work in several Boston based art galleries, as well as at Tufts University Art Galleries. Her MFA thesis made her a featured artist on the MFA, Boston 2020 Takeover Fridays social media project, the 2020 Area Code Art Fair StoreFronts Projects, and one of the Boston Globes “5 Outstanding Art School Grads”. She has received the Will and Elena Barnet Painting Award, a Tisch Library Graduate Research Fellowship, and presented at Black Portraitures, NYU.

She was awarded a Post Graduate Teaching Fellowship at the SMFA and has taught courses at Southern Connecticut State University. McLeod is currently an Adjunct Professor at Maine College of Art (MECA), Boston College and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Diana Weymar grew up in the wilderness of British Columbia, studied Creative Writing at Princeton University, and worked in film in New York City. For the past decade, she has been threading the needle to create a material record of our times. Both on social media and in person, she has encouraged thousands of people to find their own creative path through personal and political challenges.

She is the creator and curator of the public art projects Interwoven Stories and Tiny Pricks Project. Her collaborations and exhibits bring people together around textile and embroidery to share personal stories and discuss political issues. She has worked or collaborated with Build Peace (Nicosia, Bogotá, Zurich, Belfast, San Diego), Arts Council of Princeton, Nantucket Atheneum, W.E.B. Du Bois Center at UMass Amherst, University of Puget Sound, Zen Hospice Project, Open Arts Space (Damascus Syria), Trans Tipping Point Project, New York Textile Month, Alison Cornyn’s Incorrigibles project, Syrian journalist and activist Mansour Omari, Princeton University Concerts Healing With Music program, Project Threadways, Alabama Chanin, Open Society Foundations, The Isolation Journals, Kate Bowler, Economic Hardship Reporting Project, Culture House, the Fetterman campaign, Speedwell Projects, ShowUp Gallery, Planthouse Gallery, Molly Jong-Fast, Lingua Franca, and Abortion Access Front, #notalonechallenge, and many others. Her work is also in private collections.

You can follow her daily doily on Instagram @tinypricksproject and her website is www.tinypricksproject.com.